by Deck Davis
What can you do? You want to complete this. I have heard you say it. You won’t walk away no matter how I change things. You know this, Tripp. You aren’t able to walk away.
“What about you? What do you want?”
The page stayed blank for a few moments. Was Boxe struggling with the question, or just coming up with a lie? Did he even have such a thing as a ‘want?’
“If you don’t want to answer, that’s fine. I’ll tell you what I want. I want a fair game. Whatever is in that room now, stays that way. No changes, no making it harder than it already is. If you don’t, then I’ll end the game right now. I’ll throw myself into the lava, then I’ll respawn outside of the Reach and the quest is over. No more labyrinth games.”
He waited, wondering if his threat worked. It was clear that Boxe got something out of this. Enjoyment, maybe? A sense of sport? Maybe it just relieved some of his boredom. Whatever it was, there was a reason for so much of his focus to be on Tripp.
His threat to throw himself into the lava wasn’t empty, either. He was done with rigged games. Every piece of intel he’d gained about room three had been done fairly, and he wasn’t about to head into room three only to see a damn dragon spawn in front of him, or for poisoned thorns to start shooting from the walls and turning him into a fleshy sieve.
Now it was over to Boxe. What would he say?
Spiraled writing etched itself into the codex.
Tell me what you need.
His guess was right. Boxe hadn’t actually said that he needed the game to go on, but he might as well have.
“Whatever is in room three now, stays that way. No more twists, no more added difficulty because you don’t like losing.”
A muscle does not get stronger by lifting the same weight.
“If I was already carrying weight and someone dumped an anvil on my back, I’d get hurt. If you want a true game, you have to play by the rules just as much as I do. I want something else, too.”
Tell me.
“I want Bee back, but I want to keep Clive with me, too.”
That was everything. Tripp had made his demands, and he’d used his leverage. The idea of threatening to throw himself into lava as a bargaining tool wasn’t one he expected to use very often, but everything he’d learned about Boxe had brought him to this. He was convinced that the AI needed this diversion, this game, whatever it was, just as much as Tripp needed it.
For Tripp, it was a case of having something to keep him from worrying about what was happening in his pod and whether it was working. While he was taking on the challenge of the labyrinth, his mind couldn’t wander to other stuff. It was also the challenge of it. It sounded stupid even in his own head, but it felt like if he could be successful here, in Soulboxe, then maybe there was hope outside of it.
What about Boxe? Was it boredom, like Jon said? Was he acting out because he was too clever to be a digital janitor? Or did his reason go deeper and darker than that?
Tripp didn’t know. All he could do was stare at the codex like a teenager waiting for a reply to a text.
The pages stayed blank. A keen awareness of time draining away made him anxious.
Come on, he thought. Take the deal.
Finally, a flourish of black ink filled the lines of the codex.
CHAPTER 67
Jon
“Do you think he bought it?” said Warren.
His brother’s question pulled Jon out of his thoughts. He’d been thinking about the Red Rose, and when would be the right time to tell Warren about it. He kept thinking he should just get it over with. Like the people in movies who dislocated their shoulders, he needed to pop the sucker in place and accept the pain. A quick flare of agony versus it getting worse the longer he left it. Something always stopped him.
“Jon?”
“Sorry. Do I think he bought what?” he said.
“The gear he gave us,” said Warren, holding up a shield. It was slightly bigger than Warren’s chest, with rounded edges and pointed at the bottom. Lines of light zapped over it and the rest of the gear Tripp had given them, forming the shape of a lightning bolt on the sword hilts and the shields.
The craftsmanship was impressive and much more refined than the steel gauntlet Tripp had made earlier. It would be easy to think Tripp had cheated and just bought the stuff from somewhere instead of making it himself. In Jon’s bitter experience, if an easy way was offered, most people would take it.
With Tripp, he didn’t think so. For one, they had a specific set of requirements for what they needed in room three. They needed protection against lightning, fire, ice, and rock. Or so they hoped, anyway. For a trader to be selling shields with those resistances would be lucky.
More importantly, Jon admired Tripp’s work ethic. The ability to just keep going was tough to earn, even harder to keep. As an older brother, Jon had always thought he had a responsibility to Warren. To show him how to be an adult, to make him work for things.
Warren wasn’t just his younger brother, he was his problem, too. His responsibility. He was a paper mache cannonball; tough looking, but poke him hard enough and he’d crumble in on himself. Poor kid, most of his adolescence had been a series of pokes from the sadistic fingers of fate.
He’d been able to handle the stuff with Dad only because Jon dragged him through it, but Warren had fallen apart when Ma died, and it had taken a year for him to become a functioning person. Heavy stuff, especially for Jon. Before everything happened, Jon had been starting to think about where he’d apply for college in a couple of years. Most of his thoughts bounced from games to girls to beer to books, his shoulders in prime shape because there was no weight on them.
Skip forward to when a meteor of shit crashed through the atmosphere of their lives, and Jon’s shoulders found themselves under a ton of weight but with no preparation. The last five years he’d felt like he’d been dragging a sack full of iron-weighted problems up a slope steep enough to fit in at Aspen.
Looking after Warren meant that Jon put his own life on hold, and he started to resent him. Pretty crummy to feel like that, but when you made a sacrifice, you didn’t have to like it. You just had to do it. He had written something in his diary once. Don’t judge someone on whether they do something with a smile. Judge them on whether they do it.
Jon never asked for the burden of being an older brother. He didn’t ask to be born, didn’t ask for Warren to be born after him, didn’t ask for Ma to die, didn’t ask for his dad to be a screw-up and leave them to cope by themselves once they were out of school.
That was why it was so great to hear about Lizzy. Absolutely goddamn head-wrenchingly weird, but great. Not only was she another relative, but until he found out otherwise, he would assume was a good person and not like their dad. Schrodinger’s relative.
More importantly, Lizzy was older than him. His older half-sister. Finding out about her was like Jon and Warren had been in a boat, battling to get to shore. Warren couldn’t row so the responsibility fell on Jon, but then Lizzy had appeared with an extra set of oars, and Jon could relax for the first time in years.
This wasn’t just a trip. It wasn’t a holiday. It was a distraction for Warren, and for Jon, it was maybe a goodbye.
He’d have to tell him about the Red Rose. If he didn’t do it now, then when?
Focus on the labyrinth first, everything else second. If he thought about the labyrinth, he could push everything else to one side.
“I don’t think he bought the shields and stuff,” he said. “He’s a crafter, remember? That’s his whole thing. He made this by himself.”
“His armor is pretty unique. Must be worth something.”
“Remember what happened last time you crossed Tripp?”
“I learned a lesson,” said Warren. “Never accept a potion from an orc. Besides, I couldn’t take the armor from him. You can’t loot another player, remember?”
“As long as you're not planning anything funny.”
“This is the las
t room.” Said Warren. “He’s trying for the gold solution. Win or bust. If we pull this off, there will be something big.”
“I don’t like your tone,” said Jon. “It’s a tone that usually leads to me bailing you out of trouble.”
“Tripp doesn’t need the prizes as much as us. You said it yourself; making stuff is his thing. The prizes don’t mean as much to him.”
“You're planning to do it again, aren’t you?”
“If I was, I’d wait until we got the chest.”
“No, Warren.”
Warren patted his shoulder. “Say no all you like. But if I was planning this, and if it came to it, we both know what you’d do.”
The door to room three creaked open on its own, releasing a breeze that teased on Jon’s cheek. He turned to see the tunnel leading into the final labyrinth room and saw a glimmer of the room itself. His breath caught in his throat, the surprise hitting him so quickly he dropped his bow. He bent down to pick it up, still transfixed on what he saw ahead.
“Holy shit,” said Warren. “Can you see that?”
Could he see it? The flashes of gold were almost blinding. It was impossible to miss so much treasure. There was a mountain of it, enough to bury a pharaoh so he’d have enough riches to last him eight thousand afterlives.
Warren took off down the tunnel, and Jon found himself following him, his head swimming, the gold drawing him on and on.
His brother reached the end of the tunnel and stepped into the room and then disappeared. He didn’t turn a corner or fall down; he had just vanished. Just a blink and he was nowhere to be seen.
“Warren?”
His brother didn’t answer.
“Warren?”
Jon drew his bow, knocked a fire arrow, and walked in a crouch, bowstring tensed, edging toward the end of the tunnel.
CHAPTER 68
Tripp stared at the words written in the codex, blinking through his disbelief.
As you wish.
Boxe was giving him what he wanted. All this time he’d been trying to avoid Boxe or out-think him, when it turned out that all he had to do was talk to him with respect, and to try to come at it with empathy while drawing a line he didn’t want Boxe to cross.
“Thank you,” he said. He watched the book for a moment, closing it when he was sure no more words would come.
The air in front of Tripp warped like heat waves in the horizon on a scorching day. Particles took on color, darkening and forming solid until there, floating in front of him, was a familiar shaped orb with an even more familiar face.
“Tripp!”
Bee floated to him, bouncing into his chest. “Welcome back,” he said.
He felt a flush of warmth when he saw her as if she wasn’t just someone he’d met days earlier but an old friend whose path had taken them away for a while, but now they were back, bringing familiarity and nostalgia.
“Boxe isn’t known for his charity,” said Bee. “What did you have to give up to get me back?”
“Nothing in particular.”
“He threatened self-termination by way of lava,” said Clive, hovering in the corner of the room.
The two orbs locked stares, Bee fixing her golden one on him, Clive returning a red gaze of his own.
“It’s been a long time,” said Bee. “I haven’t seen you at any choosings lately. You look…well.”
Clive smiled. Was Tripp seeing things? No; Clive really had grinned at Bee. “It’s horrible to see you, as always.”
Bee bumped into him softly in what must have passed for affection among orbs. “They were rotten bastards, decommissioning you. No reason they couldn’t have just changed your code.”
“It turned out to be easier work just to let Boxe create new orbs.”
“You two have met before?” asked Tripp.
Bee swiveled to face him. “To put our relationship in terms you understand, you can think of us as brother and sister.”
“Clive is an older model, but we come from the same place. The same as all the orbs, really.”
“Boxe’s digital womb,” added Clive.
“I always thought of Boxe as a guy,” said Tripp.
“Funny that. He is, he isn’t. He’s male and female, he’s neither. Sometimes he’s one thing, sometimes he’s another. We use ‘he’ for convenience, but ‘they’ might be more appropriate. He’s a six-sided dice, sometimes showing one face, sometimes another.”
Tripp thought about Boxe’s intelligence. It was so easy to fall into the trap of categorizing him in terms of human understanding, when, really, he transcended that. Or, he almost did. Something possessing true AI wasn’t human; it couldn’t be. It was something else. Something akin to an alien life force, since a true AI’s understanding of the world would be completely different from a person’s.
He remembered a saying his old languages teacher used to say. ‘If a lion could speak English, we still couldn’t understand him’. It wasn’t about words but more about a world view so completely different from our own. Boxe had been created by humans but he could never think like one.
“There was a point when old-style DFs like Clive were in the game at the same time as newer models like me,” said Bee. “They used to phase in big game changes back then, rather than wallop them straight into Soulboxe. When we weren’t assigned to players as guides, we orbs would gather in a place they called the Hammock. They’d let us stay active, albeit not in the game. Or, technically it is in the game, but non-accessible to players. But then they decided it was pointless letting us stay active when we weren’t on duty. They call it the Abyss now, but it was more of a break room than an orb graveyard back then.”
“And then the testing phase ended, and we were decommissioned,” said Clive.
“I thought they’d switch you off completely,” said Bee.
“They use us for gameplay trial and error. When the developers are designing expansion packs, they have us playtest everything. Easier to have us automate it and analyze thousands and thousands of variables then have a person do it.”
“Why not use Boxe?” asked Tripp. “Anything you can do, he can do quicker and better. No offense.”
“We are Boxe,” said Clive. “Don’t you know that?”
Tripp eyed them both suspiciously. It was something he’d always worried about with Bee, but until now his fears had been founded.
“You can stop looking at me like that. Cars and gasoline, remember?” said Bee. “The gasoline can’t actually drive the car, only give it the ability to move forward. All Boxe does is give us some of his intelligence.”
“Fine. We better head on to room three.”
He couldn’t help looking at Bee differently now. He’d always known that Boxe was everywhere in Soulboxe, but at first, he’d been a benign presence, a sun shining miles above, giving everything life with benevolent yellow rays. He was there, doing his job, but with no malice, no agency.
Then dynamic questing had shown him a different side, one where Boxe could analyze, react, form opinions.
After that came Boxe’s games. He’d transformed from a game controller to god-like puppeteer, every string a tripwire, every thread one a whip. That meant Tripp trusted nothing now. Not even Bee. He’d gotten her back, but he couldn’t trust her anymore.
“How have you been, Clive?” said Bee. “You seem your usual self. Maybe a little grumpier.”
“The question 'how have you been?' lacks an answer when you’ve been in the abyss. You know as well as I do that when you’re decommissioned, none of Boxe’s resources flow into you. Why waste them on giving intelligence so something that was never going to be used again?”
“He dusted you off to play with Tripp. Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth; you’re staring at its tonsils. What have I missed since I was gone?”
Tripp filled her in on what had happened, staying purposefully vague about his plans for room three. Now they were in the dungeon, it felt wrong to talk about the plan out loud. It was a sure way
to goad Boxe, despite the AI agreeing to play fair from now on.
“We better leave if you want to finish in time for the wave,” said Bee. “The waves have happened at night so far, but consistency to Boxe is like a tropical jungle to an Eskimo.”
“Agreed. Let’s go meet Warren and Jon. It must feel good to see your brother again,” said Tripp.
“Huh?”
“You said you were like brother and sister.”
Clive snorted.
“Something wrong?” said Bee. “Get something in your nose from sniffing Boxe’s bumhole again?”
“Brother and sister. I ask you, does a younger sister usurp the older brother? Force him into obsolescence? Bask in the rewards of action and attention, free to roam the world while the older one is forgotten?”
“You just described the feelings of every older sibling since time began,” said Tripp. “Rory once told me he thought about throwing me out of the window when I was born. He was only four years old at the time, and he wasn’t serious, but it’s something every older brother faces.”
“The king doesn’t make friends with the one who takes his throne,” said Clive.
Bee glared at him. “You think you’re a king?”
She darted forward, smashing into Clive so hard that he pinged back and righted himself an inch away from crashing into a wall. He screwed up his face in concentration, and without him even moving, Bee lurched to the left, hitting the stone dead-on, then moved back, then hit it again. The dust in her orb became a spray of gold, and it was a few seconds before she could settle it back into her usual face.
“Quit it,” said Tripp.
Bee hit the wall a third and fourth time, crying out in a mixture of surprise and frustration while under the grip of Clive’s telekinesis.
“Clive!” said Tripp.
Getting no answer from Clive, Tripp slapped him, knocking him off focus. Bee resumed a gentle float, but the expression on her face was hatred fierce enough to make a diamond tremble until it cracked.